World views based on a centralized narrative.

There are millions of "reasonable," "moderate" people who approach individual issues carefully and "responsibly" but their entire window to reality is through a very narrow window of selected and filtered information, and they don't realize it.

I rarely hear a lot of these "moderates" spend any intellectual effort opining on the very significant impact that the centralized corporate media has on their world views. Some people pay a little bit of lip service to it, but its clear they don't see how much of a pathological scenario they are victim to.

Moderates tend to brush this off this by bringing up that while imperfect (understatement) it is still better than all the other state-controlled, or religious influenced media outlets around the world. While there is plenty of legitimacy to this argument, it shouldn't be used as an escape hatch to avoid the truth. The truth is that whatever options you have available to you in mainstream american media are VERY distorted and can not possibly (on their own) lead one to understanding how things in the world really are.

People take a mainstream article and, out of a mixture of brainwashing and laziness, they don't feel the need to confirm sources, or check who these "experts" are or look into the actual context of the "studies" that are being quoted. They approach complicated world issues the same way they do shopping on Amazon. If 4,000 people give this toaster a 4.9 rating, then it must be good. That works well for consumer reviews, but not for news. Do not take comfort in the herd. You have to take comfort in a reliable process for determining reality.

If you do not take an active role to confirm/criticize your own world view then your opinions of the world are probably based on distortion at best and fiction at worst.

If you don't take this graphic seriously you might as well give up trying to "stay informed."

Completely Solid Orange

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That's the thing. Having time.

Feb 27, 2018, 11:57 AM

There is not enough time for democracy to work if the media is centralized and controlled by narrow corporate interests. The only way for the amount of time we have to be compatible with a functional democracy is if our news media is prevented from becoming nothing more than elements of conglomerate, corporate trusts. (Think Teddy Roosevelt and Trust-busting.)

We were always vulnerable to the news media becoming commercialized. Once the values of independent journalism were overtaken by corporate interests, (profit, advantageous political narratives, entertainment, etc) it became impossible for honest, reasonable, moderates to know anything real about the world by relying exclusively on American mainstream media.

Historical context is a pre-requisite to being able to evaluate sources of news. If you don't already know a lot about a certain topic, then it is extremely difficult to ever have a high level of confidence. I use Twitter, among other things, so that I can test sources of information and downgrade/upgrade them based on a number of factors. Over time I have collected a couple hundred sources that guide me closer to reality than further away from it. And I never treat any of them as gospel. Sometimes you can distill what is likely true from comparing alternative perspectives. I am always willing to add/delete sources based on my own standards. But the standards are mine, not a corporation's.

Twitter is a double edged sword though, as most people create a massive network of confirmation bias. Plus, the people behind twitter clearly have their own agenda. I ignore the stories/tweets they push to the top of the "search" function.

I also try to focus on a few topics that are especially important to me, because there is never enough time to know enough to have a confident opinions about everything. People feel so entitled to an opinion, that they are susceptible for forming one after reading a subject title or two.

But for anyone with a genuine desire to be informed, Twitter (if used carefully) is the best tool I have been able to find. I'm sure it will be crushed one day. Facebook is long past dead as a source of any real information. Facebook is worse than mainstream media imo, as it is even more centralized and manipulated.

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World views based on a centralized narrative.

From what do you copy/pasta?***

If you right click on a picture, you can see it's source.***

And in case you didn't already realize I wrote the post

This is the source, by the way

Misleading post you have there.

I consider myself to be "reasonable" and "moderate"

That's the thing. Having time.

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